time for knitting again

As usual, Christmas went by in a flurry of activity, and now life begins to calm back down. In and amongst the presents, the cookies, and the Christmas cake we somehow forgot to finish making (!), I had time to work on a couple of projects. Astounding!

The first is a basic tam, using the pattern in Mary Rowe’s Knitted Tams book and that luscious Mountain Colors hand-painted yarn that I bought at Windsor Button in November. I flew through this one, finishing it in a mere two days after casting on. I’m not a huge fan of variegated yarns, but I like the way this one made almost a spider-web pattern, with the swirls of the decreases looking like a subtle shadow-spider.

It will need a little elastic around the ribbing to help keep it snug, though. I’ve made two other tams using Mary Rowe’s pattern, and the small amount of 1×1 ribbing isn’t enough to keep the hat on my head, especially in Boston’s sometimes ferociously windy wintry days. A little bit of cord elastic, though, and this hat (like the others) will suit me perfectly.

There’s something almost unbearably optimistic about a tam or beret, I think. You can’t help but wear it at a sort of jaunty angle, which never fails to give me a jaunty attitude.

Next is a work in progress that should be finished very shortly. My two stepkids gave me the most thoughtful gift–two balls of Artful Yarns’ Flirtation, a wonderfully nobbly yarn just right for a playful scarf. This yarn has been a very quick knit, and I’ve finished up one skein and am midway through the next one. I love the way the colors fade from one to the next, with a texture that reminds me of the toy poodle I had many years ago. (My mother used to say that it would be great to save all the hair from that poodle to knit into sweaters. At the time, I thought she was nuts, but it’s not sounding so crazy to me these days. How many people do you know have an authentic poodle scarf? 🙂

And today I made a trip to one of my favorite metro-Boston yarn shops, Wild and Woolly in Lexington, for some yarns to make hats for my stepkids. The purple hat I’d made last week was woefully too small, so that became a winter hat for Portia’s American Girl doll, and I will start again for one for Portia. And Throsby could certainly use a warm hat to keep his ears warm on his paper route, so I will be making a double-layer wool hat for him. More to come as I make progress on these ones.